With the proliferation of billions of web sites from which billions of people wish to find information, search engines have become an essential part of using the Internet. Unfortunately, this same growth has degraded the quality of the search engines and the quality of the results that users can obtain from them. When the web consisted of only 1 million pages, a search result of 1/10 of 1% was only 100 pages. But, with a searchable web of 10 billion pages, a mere 1/10,000 of 1% (an infinitesimal fraction) is 10,000 pages, far more than any person can readily comprehend.
The problem is only getting worse. For example, efforts are already underway to make the entire contents of every book ever published available online.
Since a search engine can only show a fraction of an actual result set, existing search engines use various techniques to rank pages, so as to present the most relevant results first. These techniques quickly break down with a large amount of data. It is the conclusion of this inventor that any technique which fails to narrow the list of results rather than just ranking the results will inevitably fail.
The reliance of existing search engines on literal keyword searches causes users to be unable to find pages which don't have the words they're searching for, even if the pages contain the information they are looking for. Rather than specify what they want to find, users have to guess what words might appear on a page that has what they're looking for. The result is that using an existing search engine is a bit like working with an absent-minded reference librarian, who can't remember who you are or why exactly you're in the library, and keeps handing you stuff you're not interested in. You have to get more and more specific in what you're looking for and, after a while, you start wondering who's helping who.
The result of these problems is that current users of search engines spend significant amounts of time searching and re-searching in order to find the information they are looking for.
Prior art search engines treat each search independently, with no connection to previous searches, either within a session, or for a user. It is well known that one can't take over a half-played hand in game of Bridge and instantly understand what's going on because essential information is unavailable (the cards that have already been played and are no longer visible). Yet, prior art search engines are built on the premise that they can jump into the middle of a search session and know what's going on based on a single search query of a few words.
Prior art search engines have taken a number of approaches in attempts to improve results, but these approaches frequently exacerbate the problem rather than ameliorating it. For example, returning unusable or unacceptable results faster than before doesn't solve the underlying problem of unusable or unacceptable results. The same is true if the search engine finds more unusable or unacceptable results—this just makes more work for the user to sort through additional unusable or unacceptable results. Many of the approaches actually increase the work required of a user of the search engine, or slow down users of the search engine.
In summary, prior art search engines have not made headway on the difficult problem of making a search engine easier or more efficient to use. The present invention overcomes these significant disadvantages and limitations of prior art.